All Too Human: Bacon, Freud, and a Century of Painting Life

by Elena Crippa (Editor)

All Too Human celebrates the painters in Britain who strove to represent human figures, their relationships, and their surroundings in the most intimate of ways—and features breathtaking works by Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon alongside rarely seen pieces by contemporaries such as Frank Auerbach and Paula Rego. Despite vast differences in approach and style, the works included all capture the sensuous, immediate, and intense experience of life through the medium of paint. Published to accompany a major exhibition at Tate Britain in London, All Too Human not only demonstrates how this spirit was passed down by artists of the previous generation, such as Walter Sickert and David Bomberg, but also explores how contemporary artists continue to express the complex intangible realities of life in paint today.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction

224 pages, Paperback

Published October 30, 2018

Reviews

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Catalogue to the exhibition we went to at Tate Britain.
When I say 'read' I did skim read a couple of the (quite substantial) essays in the book, which talked about the suggestion of a 'London School' of (mainly) figurative painting, but really I gazed at the wonderful paintings marvellously reproduced here of works by Bacon, Freud, Kitaj, Auerbach,Rego, Souza, Uglow etc., their predecessors Spencer and Sickert , Soutine and Coldstream etc. and their successors Celia Paul, Jenny Saville etc. (emphasis here on women artists). A fantastic exhibition is well served by this catalogue, and were I still working I would scan and reproduce some examples here, but retirement has closed down that option. Instead here's a link which will give you some idea:
https://www.standard.co.uk/go/london/...

[Philip · Rating 3 out of 5]

All Too Human - Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life edited by Elena Crippa is a catalogue for a 2018 exhibition in London’s Tate Gallery. It's a present works by the titled painters, plus several others who comprise what the compilers describe as a London Group. A weakness in the presentation is the labelling of these artists as a Group simply by virtue of their having lived in London and largely studied at a small number of the capital’s schools. Styles here are often divergent. Paula Rego, one of the featured artists, is Portuguese but trained and for a while lived in London. Kitaj also was not British, but London seems for him to have been home.

But perhaps this divergent list of artists represents a particular strength of London, being its cosmopolitan sophistication. Lucian Freud was from an immigrant family as a result of his eminent grandfather's flight from Nazism. John Singer Sergeant was American. Francis Newton Souza, also featured throughout the book, was from Goa. Celia Paul is British, but was born in India. Chaime Soutine, elements of whose style were either adopted or at least appreciated by some of the featured artists, was Russian. Just to complicate things further, he was Jewish, trained in France, was born in what is now Belarus and influenced artists working in London. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye was born to a family of Ghanaian immigrants to Britain. David Bomberg also studied, lived and worked in London, but he was Birmingham-born to a family of Polish immigrants. Again, this is London’s strength and, indeed, its very identity. It is big, cosmopolitan and sophisticated - big in ideas as well as in size, cosmopolitan in outlook as well as by population and sophisticated enough to welcome diversity and not be threatened by people’s freedom of movement or, for that matter, freedom of expression. London is thus different from the rest of the United Kingdom. It is even different from the rest of the United Kingdom’s cities, and so the catalogue’s claim of “London Group” for these diverse artists goes beyond merely artistic considerations. It also, arguably, undermines its own intention by creating a label that is shared only because those included in its sphere are so diverse as to share, arguably, little in common.

The contributors offer insights rather than analyses. And this is a strength of the narrative, since analysis is in the eye of the viewer of these works. Their comments are often descriptive but, with the exception of Andrew Brighton’s essay, always apposite. Again, with one exception, they clarify and inform our ability to observe these works, all of which, in some way or other, concentrate on the human form. Where the body is not immediately apparent, its presence is at least implied, even essential to our interpretation of a response to these paintings.

Bacon’s tormented forms, Freud's brutally interpretive brush strokes, Yiadom-Boakye’s often frozen dancers, Kitaj’s suffering hedonists, Paul's apparently apologetic presence, Newton Sousa’s Byzantine saints, Rego’s stocky surfaces, all of these and more are presented to illustrate how we inhabit the images of our bodies through different eyes. Neither the exhibition nor its catalogue aims at anything like coherence or completeness and does not approach either. But that would miss the real point, which is that we imagine ourselves, image ourselves and represent ourselves. We do not control how others see see us or interpret what they see. But what these artists via this exhibition and catalogue do communicate without ambiguity is that there exist as many ways of seeing the world and as many ways of interpreting human presence within it as there are eyes that see it. And note: many of us also have more than one eye.

[Servabo · Rating 3 out of 5]

"All Too Human" tells the story of how painters in 20th century Britain have used paint to record their personal, sensuous, immediate, and often intense experiences of life. Spanning a century, this history encompasses a diverse but related group of painters who focused on the depiction of the human figure and the everyday landscape they inhabited. Despite their great differences, these artists all shared a similarly intense and scrutinizing gaze, and were committed to rendering intimate and powerful representations of humanity.

The reinvention of the European tradition of figurative painting - especially paintings of the human figure, clothed and unclothed - is one of the most important contributions British art has made since the Second World War. Each artist associated with this tendency has sought to find new ways of capturing the physical and psychological presence in paint of a single human being, often painted from life, or else a group of people or an environment that reflects the larger dynamics of history and society. It is a tendency that is unusual in modern art for reinventing, rather than breaking with, genealogies of pre-1900 art. Whether focused on the human figure alone, a nondescript corner of the urban environment, or a larger social drama, that reinvention unmistakably reflected the existential and societal crises of the postwar age.

"I never visualize a picture before I start. I have an impulse and I try to find a form for that impulse." - Frank Auerbach

"The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world. It is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not monumental." - Max Weber

Positivist disenchantment is not a condition fo disbelief - it is a faith in rationalization and intellectualization as the instruments of human betterment. Within this faith aesthetic experience can only be rescued from triviality by attributing progressive agency to art. Rejection of modernism is a refusal of the rationalized and institutionalized aesthetics of positivist disenchantment. It gave rise to paintings as enactments of resistant modes of cognition. Their proof is their aesthetic force; their verification is a kind of beauty.